It's Monday morning. A clinical supervisor opens her laptop to a queue of 12 student SOAP notes waiting for review. Some are in Google Docs. One arrived as a Word attachment. Her CALIPSO log is open in a separate tab. She still needs to verify 25% supervision compliance for three clients before the week's sessions start. None of these systems talk to each other.
This is the daily reality for a lot of SLP clinical supervisors, and it points to a real problem: most SLP clinical practicum documentation software on the market was built for private practice billing workflows. University training clinics operate differently, and most tools weren't designed with that in mind.
Here's what makes university speech clinics different, what ASHA actually requires that most software can't support, and what to look for when you're evaluating your options.
University Speech Clinics Aren't Private Practices (And the Software Should Know That)
A typical private practice has a handful of licensed clinicians. They see patients, write notes, submit claims, and the EMR is built around that loop. A university training clinic looks nothing like that.
You might have two supervising SLPs overseeing 30 or 40 graduate student clinicians in a given semester. Those students aren't billing providers. They're building toward ASHA certification. A per-provider pricing model doesn't map to that structure, and neither do most of the features that come with it.
The people using the system have genuinely different needs. A student clinician should only have access to the patients on her assigned caseload. That's not a preference, it's a FERPA requirement.1 A supervising SLP needs to see every student's documentation across the full caseload. A clinic director needs program-level visibility: who has outstanding notes, which supervisors have pending approvals, what the documentation backlog looks like heading into week's end.
There's also a teaching dimension that generic speech therapy EMR software doesn't account for. Students aren't just using the EMR to get work done. They're learning documentation habits, developing their clinical voice, and getting real exposure to EMR workflow before they enter their first full-time position. If the system they train on is a workaround built for solo practitioners, those students are learning the wrong thing.
And then there's the cohort turnover problem. Every semester, a new group of students rotates in. That means the onboarding process needs to be repeatable, fast, and manageable by someone who already has a full caseload. If getting a new cohort up and running takes weeks of IT setup and individual walkthroughs, the software is a liability, not an asset.
What ASHA Actually Requires, and What That Means in Software Terms
To earn the Certificate of Clinical Competence in Speech-Language Pathology, students need 400 total supervised clinical hours: 25 hours of guided observation and 375 hours of direct client contact, with at least 325 of those at the graduate level.2 Every direct contact session must be documented and verified with a supervising clinician's signature. That's not optional documentation. It's a credentialing requirement.
The 25% supervision rule adds complexity. ASHA requires that direct supervision constitute no less than 25% of each student's total contact time with each individual client, not just overall.3 Per client. A supervisor overseeing 10 students, each carrying five active clients, needs to track 50 separate compliance figures. Most electronic medical record systems can't generate that data.
Supervision must also be periodic throughout the practicum. It can't be concentrated at the start of the semester and then dropped. And the supervising clinician must hold a current CCC-SLP with at least nine months of post-certification experience. Their identity needs to be tied to the documentation record, not just attached as a checkbox after the fact.
Then there's the program-level layer. The Council on Academic Accreditation revised its Standards for Accreditation, with the new requirements taking effect October 2025.4 Annual reports submitted after that date have to reflect the updated standards. That means clinic directors need to be able to generate aggregated documentation data across all students and all supervisors on demand, not pull individual records and stitch them together manually.
Software that was built for a solo PT or a small OT group practice isn't going to give you any of that.
The CALIPSO Gap
CALIPSO is the system most SLP programs use to track clinical clock hours, and it does what it's designed to do well. Students log their hours. Supervisors approve them. CFCC competency areas get mapped and tracked. It's used by a large majority of SLP programs and it's not going anywhere.
But here's what CALIPSO doesn't do: store the actual session notes. Manage the clinic schedule. Support billing workflows. Show you what a student targeted in last Thursday's session or what the supervisor observed about the student's cueing strategy.
So students end up logging hours in CALIPSO and writing notes in a separate tool, usually Google Docs, Microsoft Word, or whatever the clinic has patched together. Supervisors verify in both places. The clinical data lives in one system and the certification records live in another, and nothing connects them.
A student's CALIPSO entry might say 1.5 hours with Client A. The session note, what was targeted, what progress was made, what feedback the supervisor gave, lives somewhere else entirely.
The right way to think about this: CALIPSO handles clinical hours tracking for SLP certification. A dedicated EMR handles speech therapy practicum documentation and the supervision workflow that makes those notes official. They're complementary. A good EMR doesn't try to replace CALIPSO. It covers the documentation and supervision side so the two systems can do their respective jobs without everyone doing double data entry.
What a Real Supervisor Co-Signature Workflow Looks Like
The supervision workflow at the core of clinical training has a clear structure: the student drafts the note, the supervisor reviews and provides feedback, the supervisor co-signs, and the note becomes part of the official clinical record. Simple to describe. Hard to find in general-purpose practice management software.
Without a structured workflow, supervisors end up receiving notes by email, text, or through a basic submission form with no review state. They spend time reformatting entries before they can even read the clinical content. Notes get approved without feedback because there's no mechanism for feedback. The supervisory relationship gets compressed into a signature at the bottom of a submitted document.
Real-time review changes that. If a student writes an inaccurate assessment, a supervisor who can see the draft before it's finalized can correct it before it enters the record. A supervisor reviewing a submitted, already-finalized note is doing damage control. The timing matters.
For clinic directors, document completion verification gives you an at-a-glance picture of the clinic's documentation status across every student-supervisor pair. You're not manually following up with each supervisor to find out whose notes are still pending. That information is just there.
The security architecture matters too. Student access should be locked to assigned caseloads. IP-based access restrictions should satisfy university IT requirements. Multi-factor authentication and role-based permissions should be standard, not bolt-on features. University IT departments have specific requirements, and SLP supervision software that was built for private practices often doesn't meet them.
Questions to Ask Before You Choose
Most EMR comparison articles are written for private practice buyers. The questions they ask (does it integrate with clearinghouses, does it support telehealth sessions, how does the billing module work) aren't the ones university clinic directors need to answer first.
Here are six questions worth bringing to any software conversation:
- Does the software support a student-draft, supervisor-review, supervisor-approval workflow natively? Or is signing off a separate step from providing feedback?
- Can you restrict individual students to only the patients on their assigned caseload?
- Does it meet your university's IT security requirements, including multi-factor authentication, IP-based access restrictions, and HIPAA compliance?
- Can it generate per-client supervision percentage reports to document ASHA's 25% requirement?
- How does the system handle cohort turnover each semester? Is student onboarding repeatable without significant IT involvement each time?
- Can you bring your existing documentation templates (evaluation reports, treatment plans, lesson plans, intake forms) into the system, or do you have to rebuild your documentation from scratch inside it?
These aren't advanced questions. Any software built specifically for university clinical training should be able to answer yes to all of them.
What Good Practicum Documentation Software Actually Does
The purpose of SLP clinical practicum documentation software isn't just to store notes. It's to support the supervisory relationship that makes clinical education work, protect the clinic's compliance posture, and give students a realistic EMR experience they can carry into their clinical fellowship and first job.
There's a quieter argument worth making here too: if students learn documentation habits in a system that treats SOAP notes as informal drafts reviewed by nobody, that's the expectation they'll carry into their careers. The right system teaches the co-signature workflow, the supervisor approval step, the caseload discipline, not because those are software features but because those are real clinical norms.
ClinicNote was built alongside university clinic directors, and 117 speech clinics use it today. If you'd like to see how the supervision workflow, cohort onboarding, and reporting work in practice, we're happy to walk through it with you. See how it works for university clinics.
Sources
- https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/faq/518/does-ferpa-or-hipaa-apply-to-records-on-students-at-health-clinics/index.html
- https://www.asha.org/certification/2020-slp-certification-standards/
- https://www.asha.org/practice/supervision/SLP-graduate-student-supervision/
- https://caa.asha.org/reporting/standards/